Eileen Hershenov is the Chief Legal Officer at PEN America. She heads the organization’s in-house legal work, and supervises or advises other legal work to support PEN America’s mission.
Hershenov originally joined PEN America as Interim Chief Operating Officer in 2023 to help guide the organization through a period of significant internal growth and explosive external challenges to free expression. She has worked for decades, primarily as a general counsel both in the United States and abroad, at the intersection of human and civil rights, technology and law. She served most recently for five years as a Senior Vice President for the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), leading their democracy, tech policy and civil rights initiatives, and standing up a litigation program.
Prior to ADL, Hershenov served as General Counsel to several of the nation’s leading mission-driven not-for-profits, including the Open Society Foundations, Consumer Reports and the Wikimedia Foundation, which operates Wikipedia. In addition to leading the legal work at each, she helped guide certain policy initiatives. At OSF she was one of several executives who developed the initial agenda for the Foundations’ US Programs work, and was the founding General Counsel of the Central European University, architecting its ability to confer US, Hungarian and European degrees and to establish itself as the first western liberal arts university in a former Communist country. She also led the legal work for the Foundations’ establishment of offices around the world, and its purchase of the Radio Free Europe archives. At Consumer Reports, she founded the in-house legal department and grew the legal team, with a particular focus on media defense law, IP, employment, labor, privacy, board governance and transactional work. Hershenov also helped develop the Consumer Reports grassroots advocacy staff and strategy and pioneered initial plans for a privacy and tech focus in the testing departments. At Wikipedia she led the organization’s legal and policy teams, including efforts to address legislative proposals and legal attacks around the world that threatened Wikipedia’s ability to act as the world’s largest repository of free knowledge. She also led Wikipedia’s ultimately successful response to Turkey’s site-wide ban of Wikipedia.
Earlier in her career, she worked as an organizer for the New York Public Interest Research Group (NYPIRG), as a clerk for federal district Judge Jack B. Weinstein in the Eastern District of New York, as a Karpatkin Fellow at the ACLU, and a litigation associate at the firm of Morrison & Foerster. Hershenov holds a BA in Economics from Yale College and a JD from Yale Law School.